Loudness War

[T.C. Elliott]

Overly compressed audio sounds like crap. But I didn't think of hooking up an outboard compressor to to the T.V. audio circuit and seeing if I couldn't make things better. It's too much work and I'm not knowledgeable enough to pull it off, but it was an idea. I could probably put the BR900 in the signal path, though and use it as a test machine. *Ponder*

[Farrell Jackson]

a sidenote:

Some of us a guilty in participating in this war with our collabs. Example

User 1 makes a backingtrack. Masters it and send it to user 2.
User 2 adds vocals. Masters it and send it to user 3.
User 3 adds lead guitar. Masters it and uploads it.

as the mastering effects have compression (some presets more than others) the result will be a heavily compressed backing track with ORH's vocals (yeah user 2 IS ORH in 9 out of 10 cases) quite heavy compressed and the lead guitar sounding ok !

Some of us have learned from such mistakes, tho we do slip from time to time, others should learn from our mistakes. I think one of the worst cases of this was the first transatlantic blues-collab. The resulting mp3 was cool, but the sound-quality was not.

Geir is it possible to just send the individual new track/s to the original User #1 and let that person do the final mix with all the tracks? It seems that way there wouldn't be any overall compression build up.

Farrell

[Oldrottenhead]

Geir is it possible to just send the individual new track/s to the original User #1 and let that person do the final mix with all the tracks? It seems that way there wouldn't be any overall compression build up.

Farrell

we (jemima's kite) are currently working on a new song, and we upload the individual wav files to skydrive and for individual mixing (pretty much the way we have done for a while now). although the process is usually started by green, with drums and guitars as the track we all work to. for the soon to come song. flash harry is doing the final mixing. i am not to be trusted with that role  .

[Geir]

... most of us have learned a lot .... And yes, we usually now send mastered individual tracks (preferably waves as mp3 conversion sometimes introduce a time shift)

[Geir]

Well either that or we just meet up in my cabin and avoid all the hassle of sending the files around the world

[Oldrottenhead]

geir always has the best solutions 

[64Guitars]

Yep. Individual tracks in WAV format is the best way for high-quality sound, mixing flexibility, and no unwanted time shift.

Another option you could experiment with is FLAC. It has all of the advantages of WAV but uses lossless data compression to reduce the file size by about half. Since the data compression is lossless, the imported FLAC file sounds exactly like the original track before it was converted to FLAC. There's no loss of quality. WAV files take a long time to upload because they're so big. By using FLAC to cut the file size in half, you also reduce the upload time by half.

The only slight disadvantage of FLAC over WAV is that you can't load a FLAC file directly into the BR. It has to be converted to WAV first. But that's easy to do. Just import the FLAC file into Audacity or any other DAW that supports FLAC, then export it as a WAV file.

I think the benefit of cutting upload time in half outweighs the minor inconvenience of having to convert the FLAC files to WAV. And, of course, if you just want to mix the tracks in your DAW, there's no need to convert to WAV as the DAW can import the FLAC files directly. You only need to convert them if you want to put them on the BR. In most cases, you won't want all of the individual tracks on the BR anyway; you just want a stereo mix that you can play along with to add new tracks. So you don't have to convert each FLAC file. Instead, you'd load all of the FLAC files into your DAW, adjust the mix to your liking, and export the mix as a single stereo WAV file which you'd then import to the BR.

[Farrell Jackson]

Great on all the options! I've not used Flac files before but the lossless reduced file size is very appealing to me. It takes forever to send wav files. Usually about 15 minutes per track on my PC system.

Farrell

[HarmonicDistortion]

I've run into the loudness wars while listening to AM radio. At night I like to listen to the Coast To Coast radio show on the AM dial. The problem is the commercials. Their volume level is much louder then the show's level. Very annoying. I'm losing this battle, anyone know of a radio with a volume  limiter so I can get a constant volume?

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Don't know about the AM radio, but I finally got so fed up with the level-boost during commercials on TV, that I took one of my Alesis 3630 stereo compressor/limiter/gates and patched it across the program input to my audio amplifier on my entertainment system so I could level the audio.   Now the shows are the same level as the commercials.  (or is it that the commercials are the same level as the shows?     )